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Comment by rywalker | Hacker News Reader

At least 1/2 the blame is on them. No excuse not to have jr dev completely busy. That's incompetent management on their part.

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No excuse to not have a junior dev completely busy, but there's also no excuse to go working on your personal competing consulting service while on your employer's payroll.

TBH, he's probably lucky that he only got fired, and didn't end up with a lawsuit on his hands, too. (Had he actually taken clients, I suspect he would have.)

meh. you're a startup you want to waste your precious time taking a punk kid to task over consulting? you only waste time with shit like this if it's personal. and in that case you have already lost.

Indeed, he shouldn't be doing consulting, he should be learning everything he needs to be able to do the consulting after hours. If an employer doesn't train you, you should train yourself.

I've been tempted more than a few times to take vacation days and line up another gig for the week that I'm off. Double the pay for doing normal work hours?

Got fired from my last job for them not having enough work for me. Felt pretty bad about that because it was my first job and I didn't really feel that I had learned enough to be a capable developer. Found a better job in 2 weeks :)

Last thing I heard they also are letting go one of the most capable and senior developer I know and had already fired the interaction designer/graphics girls. They're down to 5 people now.

Based on my limited experience I would say it's usually a pretty bad sign if there's not enough work for the developers...

> Based on my limited experience I would say it's usually a pretty bad sign if there's not enough work for the developers...

This is absolutely true. It either means resources are being inefficiently allocated or there's not enough business to justify so many salaries.

I don't know your particular situation, however oftentimes giving a Junior developer less work is more efficient if the better developers can be more productive.

No startup ever has said "we're out of things to do". However, they often don't have time to mentor or train new employees.

any recommendations for approaching management on this? i know a junior dev that shows up to work with nothing ever assigned and his managers seem to give no shits about keeping him busy. is that a sign to jump shit or rephrase the conversation?

In this world, those that seek out additional responsibility thrive and those that wait for work to be handed to them die a slow death.

I dont care if its sweeping the floors, taking out the garbage, or simply asking for more work. If you cant find a way to justify your salary, how can you expect to keep your job?

Not being assigned work might he a good excuse for not doing work, but its not a justification for your salary and it certainly doesnt demonstrate a commitment to earning the right to your job.

This is a classic example of not taking responsibility for what happens to you.

Edit: didnt mean to be harsh...i think if this person started doing things around the office or proposed ideas or even executed on unassigned ideas that might move the company forward they will get recognition and likely promoted. Its mot about asking for work it is about showing how much you care.

Software engineering is not a profession with a consistent amount of workload. Sometimes there are lulls between projects, sometimes there are 10-hour workdays during crunch.

Ideally good management minimizes this, but it's never perfect.

This assumption is incorrect. From management's perspective it could have appeared he was not able to keep up with the workload because he was working on his projects half the time. It seems he didn't even attempt to tell them he wanted to do more and instead opted to work on his own projects.

This one is not about management.

There is no way you can silently stop working and turn your focus on private side projects. At least you need to talk to your coworkers and your management about running out of work. It´s up to you.

It doesn't even matter what he was doing with his time. If his employer wasn't satisfied with what he was producing it's in their best interest to let their employee know they need to correct the situation.

Firing him means they were in panic mode because they were lazy and decided not to manage their employees.

I'm not saying that the employer didn´t make mistakes. But it is always the same and so many people are doing it wrong.

If you are in a situation that needs to change, take action. This is your responsibility and it does not matter who fucked up this thing.

If the startup has a total of two other developers, I'm not sure they're at a point where they can afford to hire juniors devs to babysit.

Then of course there's the whole part about disclosing company trade secrets.

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